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xemacs, yehxemacs, yehPosted Nov 9, 2010 18:24 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)In reply to: xemacs, yeh by coriordan Parent article: LPC: Michael Meeks on LibreOffice and code ownership
FSF is a non-profit and whatever one can say about RMS, noone is going to ever accuse him of trying to take advantage of the code in a proprietary way and besides there is a explicit counter promise in the legal contract. None of that applies to commercial organizations.
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xemacs, yeh Posted Nov 9, 2010 19:03 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
RMS is not going to direct the FSF forever (if for no other reason than he won't live forever)
given that it is up to the FSF to decide what new license 'is in the same spirit' as the existing license, the controls around it are pretty limited. some people consider the GPLv3 to be a violation of the spirit of GPLv2
if nothing else, the Oracle misbehavior should point out to everyone that you shouldn't be focusng on the orginization you are signing things over to today, you should be concerned about what it may be years from now when it is purchased by (or merges with in the case of non-company orgnizations) some other organization.
xemacs, yeh Posted Nov 9, 2010 19:39 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
FSF agreements may not be perfect but unlike Oracle, FSF has a counter promise in a legally binding contract and that is a MUCH better situation to be in. It is not the same thing at all. People cannot use FSF to justify draconian agreements.
Tentacles of Evil Posted Nov 9, 2010 21:03 UTC (Tue) by boog (subscriber, #30882) [Link]
This argument has long been formalised by Debian as the "Tentacles of Evil Test", which seems quite relevant and foresighted these days.
http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html (see Q9c)
(As others have noted, the case of the FSF is more subtle; I'm not trying to imply they fail the test.)
xemacs, yeh Posted Nov 10, 2010 8:07 UTC (Wed) by mbanck (subscriber, #9035) [Link]
If that happens, I am also pretty sure RedHat et al. will pull an X.Org on the FSF and fork GNU at GPLv3 or whichever was the last reasonable one.
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